The most accurate predictor of longevity is unexpectedly lung size and respiratory health. If you breath 20,000 times a day but only from your upper chest. This is shallow breathing and it puts a stress on the whole respiratory system. It can be done as the body compensates but eventually it will wear it down. Using the analogy of a car, if when the car is at traffic lights and you keep revving the engine, giving the car far more fuel than it needs, eventually engine parts will start to run down. The same principle goes for the body. Why would you want to over work the body and end up getting less oxygen delivery to the tissues? Eventually the body will start breaking down. This is dysfunctional breathing. Nasal breathing is beneficial as it makes us take deeper breaths. Developing diaphragmatic motion can be learnt by breathing slowly and deeply through the nose.
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FEELING ANXIOUS? THE WAY YOU BREATH COULD HELP
How you breathe can fundamentally affect your mental state and the way you feel. James Nestor in his book Breath: The New Science of a lost Art, argues that many of us have got into the habit of bad breathing. Imagine the office worker opening up her emails in the morning and finding 150 emails waiting to be answered. Immediately, she reverts to upper chest, shallow breathing. She sighs a lot, her breathing becomes irregular and even after the initial stress has passed, this breathing pattern can become habitual and put her into a long-term stress response. This dysfunctional breathing pattern then impacts behaviours like sleep, giving her a racing mind, inducing panic attacks, causing stiff neck and shoulders(because she is using her upper chest and neck muscles to breath more than her diaphragm) and making it difficult for her to fully relax. She has breathed her way into a “fight or flight” response.
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